Personal turmoil regarding professional life and gender ideals

Greenlief speaks about the inner turmoil her mother experienced as a woman intent on pursuing a career as a professional musician, while simultaneously trying to abide by the gender ideals of the day. Earlier, Greenlief had discussed her grandmother's ideas about gender. Picking up on that theme here, Greenlief goes on to discuss how despite the fact that her mother was portrayed as an independent woman professionally, in her personal life she felt the need to demonstrate subservience to her male manager, John Lair, and to her husbands.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Barbara Greenlief, April 27, 1996. Interview R-0020. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

LISA YARGER:

What do you think she would have chosen for your mother and Rosie, also,
had she had more control? What kinds of daughters would she preferred to
have raised? Because all three of her daughters that lived ended up as
professional musicians.

BARBARA GREENLIEF:

I'd say, probably her view of what she would have thought they
should have done was to get married and stay home and raise kids and let
the men work, and be domestic. You know, I certainly think the more
modern kinds of conveniences that came along at the time they were
raising kids would have been, she would have thought that was wonderful.
You know, I don't think she would have necessarily have
wanted the old-style of doing things. She would have wanted them to be
as progressive as they could in terms of what their homes were like, but
I think that she probably viewed women working as something they
shouldn't be doing, maybe unless it was a teacher. But I
don't know any conversations about her influencing them to be
anything in particular.

LISA YARGER:

Right. Where did your mother get such a drive to pursue music? Because
all of what she writes, you know, she was always sneaking off to find
time, you know, swiping her brother's banjo. I mean, she
really overcame a lot of obstacles to do what she wanted to do.

BARBARA GREENLIEF:

You know, I think, myself, I've thought a lot about that. I
think it's genetically inborn. I really do. I think when
someone has enough of a talent—it's almost not
just a talent, it's a—I think artists who have the
perception in the area that they do develop a tunnel-visioned view of
the world almost in order to refine that. And if you look back at
artists they, you know, a lot of artists have had a very sad social
life, or sad family life, because in order to do it and perfect it, they
have to have almost that tunnel vision approach to it, where that is the
only thing that drives them. And it's such an inborn kind of
drive, that I don't think they can help it. I
don't think it would be anything they could get rid of.
That's sort of the way I view it. I've been around
a lot of musicians, you know, and know a lot of families who have people
who are successful musicians, and that seems to be what I see. Is that
it's almost like a genetic mutation. You know,
it's like a person who has no need to be what normal people
are. They just have this inborn drive that drives them in the direction
that they're going to perfect, whatever it is they have. And
my brother is the same way. I mean, talk to him about business things,
paying taxes, I mean his wife handles everything. He has no idea. He
just keeps his eye on that one thing.
And that's kind of the way she was. The only time Mom was
truly happy was when she was playing, or when she was going to play, and
when she was collaborating with people about the
next show. You know, or knew that next Wednesday someone was coming to
the house and they were all going to get together to play music. It was
just, that was it. That was the one thing that drove her. And it was
like nothing else really—she didn't want other
things to get very much in the way of that.

LISA YARGER:

Did she have to sacrifice things in her life to achieve that, to maintain
that tunnel vision that you are referring to?

BARBARA GREENLIEF:

She, well, I think that the combination of having that inbred talent and
that desire to perfect it, mixed with the kind of subservient view that
women had to men, was really a difficult thing for her all her life. She
would not openly challenge a man. And, you would not think that if you
saw her on stage perform, you know, because she is so powerful. Her
performances are so powerful and her stories are very powerful. But she
could not get away from that not directly challenging men, so that John
Lair, the other men she worked with, both of her husbands, pretty much
set the stage for what her life would be, in terms of her success. She
wasn't a business type; she did what they told her to do. All
she wanted to do was play music; she just wanted to play music. And she
did not have the professional kind of success I guess that like Jean
Ritchie, whose husband was interested in her career and who promoted her
career. I think Mom would have had a lot more wide-spread audience had
that happened. But that was a real problem for her. She was always very
privately angry about the manipulation, but she would not confront it.
So, yet, she was so strong-willed that it ate her up, you know, because
she was angry about it.
And from a young age, I remember feeling, why don't you, you
know, if you want a washer and dryer, and you don't want to
go to the Laundromat any more, why don't you just go buy one
and charge it, you know? And things like that, I recognized that from an
early age, that she had that problem. She was always having women over
and, talk about, you know, how their husbands were doing this, and they
wouldn't let them have this, and they wouldn't let
them do that, but yet she would not say a word to my father or to John
Lair about how she felt. So, that was a big frustration for her all her
life. That drive and that ability and that lack of power all combined
together.

LISA YARGER:

That is very interesting, because the performances I have seen of her,
you're right, I mean, she comes across as so independent and
so strong-willed. And that's—one of the things
I've noticed that a lot of country music scholars now writing
about women performers tend to do is they tend to make her out to be a
real feminist in her music. They talk about her as the leader of the
Coon Creek Girls and sometimes even imply that she had the power to hire
and fire band members, and she did not! It's just interesting
to me how that kind of revision of history comes about. And I think
it's possible that they knew her in her later years or saw
her, and seeing that, could not believe that it could have been
otherwise.

BARBARA GREENLIEF:

The Reel World Band, who probably the most feminist women's
group of musicians we have here in Kentucky, wonderful musicians, kind
of just, you know—she was their inspiration! They were over
there all the time, yet, I would be, you know, they were
always, I'd take her to a lot of the things she
did, the local things she did, and they would just talk to me and talk
to me about how she was their role model. And I was always just kind of,
you know, nodding my head and thinking, wow,
[Laughter]
you know, I'm not going to ruin this image! You know?
But it was not what people think, at all. It was very different than
people think. And she knew, in her heart, you know, that she needed to
do those things, that she needed to be more aggressive, but she just
felt powerless to do it. So, that was the problem.